First appeared on FOX — Israeli scholars and international law experts have determined that a new type of war crime committed by the Iranian-backed terrorist organization Hamas in its brutal October 7 attack on southern Israel is “kinocide,” or the deliberate weaponization or destruction of a family.
Eight months after the attacks that killed more than 1,200 people and took some 250 hostages to the Gaza Strip, researchers are piecing together evidence that Palestinian terrorist groups committed horrific crimes that particularly terrorized families in Israeli kibbutzim and other civilian communities.
And many of them were captured on film by the terrorists themselves, say those who are documenting all the evidence.
“We are investigating war crimes committed on Oct. 7 and are being exposed to extremely traumatic material, particularly against women and children,” Kochav El-Kayam Levy, an expert on international law, human rights and gender at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told Fox News Digital.
The UN finally acknowledges that Israeli women were raped and sexually assaulted by Hamas terrorists
This image from undated body camera footage taken by a downed Hamas terrorist and released by the Israel Defense Forces shows a Hamas terrorist wandering through a residential neighborhood in an undisclosed location in southern Israel on October 7. (Israel Defense Forces via The Associated Press)
Elkayam Levy, who was interviewed for the first time on the subject, said he had looked at all the videos taken by Hamas on GoPro cameras and cellphones.[T]The hardest crimes to document and witness are those that are most vulnerable: women and children.”
“The most distressing videos we have in our archives are those of families with terrorists invading their home, parents terrified and children screaming,” she said, describing a video clip of a mother trying to comfort her other children immediately after the eldest daughter of a family has been killed by terrorists, assuring them that it didn’t happen.
“It’s truly heartbreaking. We’ve only seen a small part of what they went through, some of them held hostage for hours,” said Elkayam Levy, who was on the frontline documenting some of the most horrific crimes, including extreme sexual violence, carried out by Hamas that day.
An aerial photo shows the site of a weekend attack by Hamas terrorists on the Supernova desert music festival, near Kibbutz Reim in the Negev desert in southern Israel, October 10, 2023. (Jack Guess/AFP)
The law professor told Fox News Digital that after reviewing hours of footage, he realized there was no adequate definition in international law to capture this kind of human suffering, meaning he couldn’t bring perpetrators who systematically targeted families to justice.
“We decided to make it our mission to document the unique harm inflicted on families and the weaponization of families,” Elkayam Levy said, adding that her team also investigates similar atrocities targeting families in conflicts around the world.
The targeting of families in wartime is not a new phenomenon: Rwanda’s 1994 genocide during the country’s civil war saw extremists from the African country’s majority Hutu target families from the minority Tutsi population. Families also came under particular attack in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the mid-1990s, and the Nazis also separated Jews from their families during the Holocaust during World War II, deporting them to labor and concentration camps.
‘It will haunt me forever’: Horrifying video of Israeli Hamas atrocities leaves viewers shocked and disgusted
Bloody handprints remain on the wall of a house after Hamas terrorists attacked Kibbutz Nir Oz near the Gaza border a few days ago. (Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images)
But what stands out about the Hamas attack Elkayam Levy cited is that the thousands of terrorists who entered Israel on October 7 filmed their actions, not only intensifying the psychological horror of their crimes but also providing researchers like her and law enforcement with hard evidence of their actions.
Many videos from that day were quickly posted to social media, with the terrorists using the victims’ mobile phones to live-stream the killings to their families, and eight months on, new footage continues to emerge.
last week, Keshet 12 News, an Israeli news media outlet The television station aired for the first time the emergency call made by Sharon Aloni Kunio, 36, after terrorists set fire to her family’s home in Kibbutz Nir Oz. In the audio, Aloni Kunio can be heard coughing as she tells dispatchers that her house is on fire and that terrorists are outside. She says she is choking on the smoke. In the background, one of Aloni Kunio’s 3-year-old twins can be heard crying out, “Mommy, please don’t die.”
Hamas terrorists killed civilians, including women, children and elderly, when they attacked Israel on October 7. (Israel Defense Forces via The Associated Press)
Aloni Kunio, along with her husband David, three-year-old daughters Emma and Yuri, and her sister Danielle and her six-year-old daughter Amelia, were all kidnapped by Hamas and sent to Gaza.
Sharon, Daniel and their three children, who declined interview requests from Fox News Digital, were all released during a week-long ceasefire last November. David Kunio remains a hostage along with about 120 other people, many of whom are believed to be dead.
Elkayam Levy said this was just one in a series of similar incidents in which terrorists violently attacked families in their homes, killing or kidnapping them.
Charred debris and objects are scattered inside a building in Al-Milim after an attack by Hamas terrorists on October 7 near the Gaza Strip in southern Israel on October 18, 2023. (GIL COHEN-MAGEN/AFP via Getty Images)
“We need to understand that family members were killed in front of each other, parents were killed in front of their children, children were killed in front of their parents,” she said. “Families were separated, some families remain separated today with fathers held captive.”
“What we are witnessing is a new crime against humanity,” Elkayam Levy said, adding that every genocide offers lessons for humanity.
“Kinocide” is a combination of “kin” meaning relative and “ocide” meaning the genocide or deliberate destruction of an entire people or part of it, and was coined by Elkayam Levy and his team after examining all the evidence from October 7th and noticing the systematic “weaponization of the family unit” by Hamas.
Israeli children abducted by Hamas terrorists reveal stories of torture and pain
On July 19, 2023, near the border in the central Gaza Strip, Hamas terrorists took part in a military parade marking the anniversary of the 2014 war with Israel. (REUTERS/Ibrahim Abu Mustafa/File Photo)
She is currently working with Professor Irwin Cotler, International Chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights, to explore ways in which these types of war crimes can be recognized in the field of international humanitarian law.
In an interview, Cotler, a former Canadian minister of justice and attorney general and an expert on international law, told Fox News Digital that three steps need to be taken for “kinocide” to become an officially recognized term not just for Hamas attacks but wherever they occur.
“First, we need to raise public awareness of the concept itself,” he said, noting that in addition to writing about the issue in the media, he plans to raise the issue with other scholars of international humanitarian law at the annual meeting this summer of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre, a Canadian NGO.
Cotler said another step would be to amend the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court, whose chief prosecutor recently announced he would seek arrest warrants for Hamas and Israeli leaders for committing war crimes during the Oct. 7 and subsequent wars.
Panoramic view of the International Criminal Court building in The Hague, Netherlands, April 30, 2024. (Selman Aksanger/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“The Rome Statute would be difficult to amend,” Cotler said, “but it does have a reference to ‘other inhumane acts,’ which could include ‘kinocide.’ It would not be a new crime, but would be recognized within the existing framework of war crimes.”
He said incorporating “kinocide” into other inhumane acts would allow the court to prosecute war crimes that specifically target family members.
Click here to get the FOX News app
Cotler also said it may be possible to have universal jurisdiction countries like Canada “amend their laws” to set an international legal precedent on these types of crimes.
“Of course, the goal of raising public awareness is achievable. The other two are up to the efforts of national prosecutors and the international prosecutor at the ICC,” he said. “There’s generally been a reluctance to do this, but I still think it’s worth trying to make it happen.”
